Aiming for Balance (eBook)

The Power of COS VAP in Structured Thinking

James Noll (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
88 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-9291-5 (ISBN)

Infos

In 'Aiming for Balance: The Power of COS VAP in Structured Thinking', James Noll explores how our thinking impacts every aspect of life. Through COS VAP-Components, Order, Steps, Viewpoint, Attention, and Perception-he provides a structured framework for evaluating beliefs, enhancing decision-making, and achieving meaningful outcomes with clarity and efficiency.

From an early age, James Noll has been captivated by a wide array of ideas and topics. His eclectic range of interests is reflected in the many skills and vocations he has pursued, demonstrating his ability to put ideas into practice. He holds a bachelor's degree in History, specializing in quantitative methods, from Clarion University. James has also owned and operated a handyman business for over 10 years, sharing his expertise in multiple trades with his customers. In addition to his professional accomplishments, he is an accomplished guitarist, fly fisherman, traditional archer, landlord, and cancer survivor.

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In "e;Aiming for Balance: The Power of COS VAP in Structured Thinking"e;, James Noll offers a transformative exploration of human thought and its profound influence on our lives. Using the COS VAP framework-Components, Order, Steps, Viewpoint, Attention, and Perception-Noll introduces a structured approach to understanding and refining the way we think. This book masterfully combines biology, psychology, and philosophy with engaging narratives, illustrating how structured thinking can simplify complex ideas and lead to better decisions. By dissecting how we think, Noll reveals that our beliefs and values significantly shape our choices and interactions. He argues that while we often receive instructions for external tasks like building furniture or operating machinery, we neglect the importance of having a "e;manual"e; for our minds. Through captivating metaphors and interdisciplinary research, Noll demonstrates that structured thinking isn't just useful it's essential for aligning what we value with how we act, enabling functionality and success. Whether navigating personal relationships, tackling professional challenges, or contemplating life's deeper questions, "e;Aiming for Balance"e; empowers readers to achieve optimal results with minimal wasted effort. The book challenges readers to reflect on their cognitive processes, values, and decision-making patterns, showing how structured thinking can unlock human potential. A call to self-discovery and mindfulness, this work invites readers to embrace the complexity of their minds while simplifying it into actionable insights, making it an invaluable guide for personal and professional growth.

Textauszug

Introduction

Throughout my life, I’ve contended with ideas, experiences, interpretations, and people. I suspect I’m not alone in this condition. The reader has and will undoubtedly encounter the many ways that life—good and bad, hard and easy, light and heavy—presents itself. These myriad of interpreted experiences are collected into frameworks within the mind, sequenced into behavior, and given a positive or negative association. When a past experience is replicated, or when one that is determined to be close enough occurs, we resurrect the relevant sequences of behavior and their attached values to process the new input. Consider tying your shoes. This action is a sequenced behavior built into a mental framework, associated with the positive or negative feelings of success or failure. Now that you’re practiced at tying your shoes, the act is an automatic process, a pattern of thought married to behavior. This is part of Jean Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development, which are the foundation for the processes that are implicit in this text.1 Another way to think of the mental frameworks are like children’s building blocks, with their shaded colors representing the feelings associated with a particular section, which has to fit with both the piece that precedes it and the one that follows. Frameworks like these, scaffolding built from simple concepts with increasing complexity as they develop, often remain hidden within our day-to-day thought processes and are easily overlooked.

Our interpretations of experiences continuously alter or reinforce the hidden frameworks we use to think, speak, and act, affecting all aspects of our lives. These frameworks nest together in order to form a coherent narrative, using belief as a binder or ligament of sorts to smooth the edges of missing information or mal-formed narratives. The following writings explore how frameworks are supported by language, altered by individual and cultural forces, and are predicated on biological adaptation over countless generations. Although not inherently obvious, we can use the ideas I’m going to present to direct these frameworks and consequently bring immense benefits to our daily lives. The place to start any investigation or adventure is always by learning about the beginning, which, like these frameworks, should be consistently revisited.

A first consideration is that these valued frameworks take on a life of their own, functioning like their own sub-personality because they are rooted in our biological processes. An example of this is the instinctual function of fear that exists in all animals until they explore. As Jordan Peterson notes in Maps of Meaning, “Fear is not conditioned, security is unlearned.”2 Exploring leads to knowledge, which minimizes fear of the unknown; fear being the nascent state, while security exists because of our implicit assumptions that we are safe, until a new threat arises and we eventually learn to not be afraid of it.

This process of learning security in spite of the profound quantity of things we cannot know is a paramount aspect of the human experience. This procedure involves the interaction of our experiences woven with our biological responses into our linguistic representations, and then represented in both the stories we tell ourselves and those that have been culturally perpetuated. To expand what is happening, consider that within the developmental concepts of Piaget are three categories of connected ideas: the first of these is action, imitation, and play. The key to this grouping is imitation, in part because despite its necessity to our early development, imitation will always remain one of the most powerful tools in our mental toolbox. This crucial piece of hardware in the human mental computer—imitation—is what initially facilitates our development from basic functions to understanding symbols. Symbols form words, which in turn form language, and language is the key to the second group: ritual, drama, and narrative. As our operations become more concrete, individual narratives interacting with other narratives eventually form the final group: myth, religion, philosophy, and rationalization. The interpretation of abstractions at this level of development depends solely on how we rationalize them and, by extension, how we evaluate categories of connected concepts.

Categories of connected concepts like existential danger and redeeming hope, evil and good, or negative and positive are just a few of these linguistic adaptations to the human condition that are woven into our frameworks. I put the categories in a different order than how they are usually spoken because even small changes in language will have large effects on how we rationalize. Ask yourself, If language isn’t tied to human function, why would we always say good versus evil, and not the other way around? If reading my mis-ordering makes you feel something without thinking about it, then you have recognized one place where your biology, language, and human functionality have been married. Despite living in general comfort and safety, these developmental processes have mixed with our biological responses, like the fear of the unknown. This is the same fear that our ancestors experienced, whether it is the fear of losing a job or the fear when you realize a panther has been stalking you.

Due to the primal nature of the fear response, it’s a crucial place to investigate the role our mental frameworks play in shaping our thoughts and behaviors, and their impact on the world around us. Among the many reasons to be aware of this link is this important one: fear is a powerful motivator and as such becomes a weapon, intentional or not. Barry Glassner highlights numerous examples in his book, Culture of Fear, like the misplaced fear surrounding Halloween candy poisoning given that, at the time of his writing, “the only two known cases where children apparently did die from Halloween candy, the myth of the anonymous sadistic stranger was used to cover up the real crime.”3

Glassner’s work shows that for decades there has been profound manipulation through fear, even when rational conclusions are easily available. Imagine someone who uses a drug like heroin willingly giving it to a random child, or a parent who misses the distinctly vacant shape left by an imbedded razor blade, or the indentation and discoloration that results from forcing anything into an apple. A well known but ignored fact of human nature that would dispel the fear is not considered; heroin addicts are not willingly giving away their heroin without something in return. Yet, every year this fear is revived and people become more suspicious of the stranger who willingly gives to their neighbors without an expectation of return. Fear of losing what we value most makes even the simplest scrutiny of knowledge secondary, at least until the fear subsides. This only amplifies in our modern lives, as the Internet exponentially exposes us to these psychologically maximized fear and propaganda purveyors. As our structured frameworks are exposed to information, carefully examined or not, they readily crystallize into beliefs and habits.

Let’s take a habit that may not be serving you well, like an addiction to alcohol. This short-term positively reinforced behavior, if left unchecked, may result in long-term negative consequences. Each time we use a substance like alcohol, the positive value we place in our mental framework strengthens our behavior regarding alcohol use. The control this structure has over our behavior becomes harder to ignore, because the temporary good feeling reinforces the drinking behavior, thereby creating the habit. To counteract this framework, we must build a new, equally fortified framework. Starting small and gradually building a reformed behavioral response the same way the negative habit was built is crucial if we wish to change. This new set of behaviors should benefit us as a whole, rather than catering to the original patterns’ short-sighted motivations. Ideas like the twelve-step program for alcoholism exemplify this process, which is rooted in religious thinking.

The example of the twelve-step program illustrates the power of language in re-building sequenced behavior frameworks that guide our actions. The aim of this text is to help us recognize how pervasive these patterned sequences are, understand their historical and biological foundations, recognize when it’s appropriate to adjust these value frameworks, and shape them to benefit our future selves. This motivation drives these writings, offering starting points for investigating these thought filters, referred to as Components, Order, and Steps (COS) and Viewpoint, Attention, and Perception (VAP). These categories may not represent all of the relevant information, and they may have overlap given the specific situation. Terms like filter, lens, structures, or patterns will be used to describe similar phenomena of nested value frameworks for reasons that will become evident. COS VAP is the adaptable lens I’m presenting as a starting point through which our cognitive structures may be expressed.

Many traditional religious texts, classical literature, and even modern movies highlight symbolic representation through narrative in an engaging, rewarding, surreal, and ultra-real way. Consider that with every word and image in a movie, as we sink deeper into an almost trance-like state, we absorb the experience as if we are there, while paradoxically remaining disembodied from the action, which can hinder solidifying these experiences into memory. This deep...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.4.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Erkenntnistheorie / Wissenschaftstheorie
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-9291-5 / 9798350992915